What It Is (3 page)

It never crossed my mind to drop out of high school. Mom had told me numerous times while I was growing up that she had been one of the bottom two graduates in her class and had barely made it out of the all-girls high school she attended. Knowing that Mom almost failed at something made me want to succeed at it even more; I wanted to show Mom that I was smarter than she was and that
she
was the idiot for being so bad at school. I had always been a fairly good student and brought home As and Bs consistently, but once I moved out, a fire was lit underneath me. I wanted to prove to Mom that I wasn’t going to fail and that I was going to graduate with honors and make something of myself, something she never did. I studied extremely hard while I lived with Matt, enrolling into a vocational school that I attended in the afternoons after my high school classes finished. I ended up doing so well that I received a scholarship transferable to any business college in the area. Schoolwork and studying came much easier to me when I wasn’t worried about Mom breathing down the back of my neck or slapping me as she walked by.

When graduation day came and I crossed that stage and the principal announced to the auditorium that I, Sarah Burleton, had earned a scholarship to college, my heart swelled with pride and I walked to the principal with my head held higher than I ever had before in my life. I had achieved something Mom never had, and never would. I was already becoming a better person than she was.

About a month after I graduated high school, Matt began to change. He began to stay out till all hours of the night with
our
friends without checking in or letting me know when he would be back. I ended up spending massive amounts of time alone at Matt’s farmhouse and began to become paranoid about Matt’s whereabouts, who he was with, and what he was doing. I started to become convinced that Matt was cheating on me and that it was only a matter of time before I was put out on the street. I became low and disgusted with myself, and I started to spend my alone time trying desperately to figure out what was wrong with me and the way I looked that would make Matt want to stay away from me like this. My mind and body went into survival mode and I needed to find something to regain control of myself and my current situation.

My form of control was reverting back to the anorexia I had succumbed to as a teenager. I had begun to starve myself at a young age in a desperate attempt to control the situation with my mother, to give myself some control over something in my life. Mom was always calling me names and making fun of every aspect of my body, and when I hit puberty and began to develop a more womanly shape, she would laugh at me and point at my legs and say, “Thunder Thighs!” or, “Cow Hocks!” When Mom and I went shopping for new jeans for school and I came out of the dressing room to show her how they fit, she would laugh and point at my “Bubble Butt” in front of customers. More than once I was hunched over crying in a small corner of a dressing room because Mom got a store full of customers to snicker and stare at me with her hateful words and condescending attitude.

Once I started starving myself, the fat jokes stopped and the anorexic jokes began, jokes that usually included one of Mom’s favorite names to call me, “Anorexic Annie.” I had started to lose so much weight that it became noticeable to everyone around me, including the school nurse. After the nurse voiced her concerns and examined me, my secret was quickly found out and Mom and Richard were forced to put me into inpatient treatment at a psychiatric hospital. I spent two weeks in that hospital, surrounded by girls and boys my age who were somewhat like me: some starved themselves, some tried killing themselves, and some were just bat-shit crazy. Who knows, maybe I was one of the bat-shit crazy ones, but if I was, I never let on. Even though I was surrounded by people who would understand me and who understand how it felt, how it
really
felt, to be hurt and abused by a parent, I refused to share my abusive past with anyone because I was still scared of going home to Mom, still scared of telling anyone our dark secret. I look back now and wonder, if I had been honest with my caseworkers and my psychiatrists about my abuse, if things
maybe
would have been different. Would they have forced my family into counseling and given Mom the help that she so desperately needed? Could I have saved our family if I had just been honest?

I don’t know the answer to those questions, and I never will. At the time, I was young, scared, and just wanted to get away from all of the doctors in white jackets and the kids arriving to the ward late at night, tied down to hospital beds. So I ate my food with a smile on my face, blamed my anorexia on stress from school, and painted a happy home life every time I was in for a therapy session with my assigned psychiatrist. Instead of learning to deal with my anorexia in healthy and safe ways, I learned new ways to hide my disorder from the girls I roomed with.

I left inpatient treatment exactly two weeks after I was checked in and immediately went back to starving myself to cope with Mom and the abuse. I hid food and used the new techniques to lose weight I had learned from the girls at the hospital, which included diuretics and laxatives. My anorexic behavior hadn’t returned since I moved out of Mom and Richard’s house, but it was still something I thought about doing every day when I looked at myself in the mirror and critiqued every inch of my body.

It was easier to starve myself this time around because I didn’t have to worry about people finding out. Matt was never home anymore so I was free to skip meals and make myself throw up as much as I wanted. I began to drop weight quickly, and when I saw those numbers on the scale go down more and more, day by day, I began to feel better about myself. Deep down, I knew what I was doing was bad for me, but I couldn’t stop myself because I needed to have control over something in my life. If the number on the scale happened to go up one morning, I would spend the rest of the day frantically running, doing jumping jacks or sit-ups; anything I could to burn off enough calories to lose that one lousy pound. Matt mentioned once or twice that he noticed I was losing weight, but instead of remembering my stories of anorexia and trying to stop my rapid weight loss, he complimented me and told me to “keep up the good work.”

One Saturday afternoon I was sitting alone at Matt’s house waiting for him to come home when the phone rang. It was Matt; he was going to be late again because he had found some “killer” weed and wanted to score some before it was all gone. I had been alone in that giant farmhouse since seven o’clock that morning and was going absolutely stir crazy. I was stuck with no vehicle, and the friends I thought I had inherited were the ones running around with Matt, taking him on weed runs and to bars. “Matt, I’m so lonely,
please
come home!” I cried into the phone’s receiver. Matt took a deep breath. “Sarah, you need to grow up. I can’t babysit you all day long.”

My heart immediately split in half and my stomach fell. I put the receiver into my lap for a moment and covered my face.
Please, God, make him love me.

I picked the phone up and put it back up to my ear. “I’m so sorry,” I started to say, but it was too late: Matt had already hung up. I smashed the receiver back into the cradle, ran to the bathroom, and knelt over the toilet. As if by habit, I stuck my finger down my throat and threw up what little I had allowed myself for breakfast that morning. I gripped the sides of the toilet and sobbed as I kept heaving for what felt like an hour until I could throw up no more. I pulled myself up and caught a glimpse of my face in the mirror. My eyes were red and puffy, sweat was pouring down my face, and remnants of my vomit were smeared on my mouth and shirt collar. I squeezed my eyes instinctively to pray to God when suddenly I thought of myself crossing the stage at graduation and the scholarship I had received and how proud I had felt that day.

The same calmness I used to feel wash over me after uttering “Amen” when I was a child washed over me at that moment.
Look what I’ve accomplished already,
I thought to myself.
I can get through this!
I took a deep breath, turned on the cold water tap, and splashed my face. As the water hit my face I laughed and said out loud, “I’m letting a pothead ex-convict do this to me. Jesus Christ!” I was shocked at what I had just spoken aloud. It was the first time since I’d met Matt that I had felt ashamed of him and felt ashamed of what I was doing with him. It made me sick once I started to think about it: I had lost my virginity to him; I had accompanied him on visits to his parole officer and sat there smiling as I listened to his extensive rap sheet and lied for him by saying I was eighteen years old to avoid getting him in trouble for statutory rape.

What were his intentions? Why would a grown man want a kid, and then tell her that she needed to grow up? Why would I be with a person like this?
My mind was racing as I realized what a horrible mistake I had made by allowing this man to take advantage of my most precious gift to another person: my love. A small voice nagged at me.
If it wasn’t for him, though, Sarah, you would have been with Mom!
So was I the bad person? Did I use Matt and use my situation to tug at his heartstrings in order to escape Mom’s house? Was I using men the same way that Mom had throughout my entire childhood, using them to get what she wanted and then throwing them away?

I can’t be with him
, I thought.

It became clear to me as I stood in that bathroom that I wasn’t ready to be with anyone at this point in my life. I had spent years trying to escape the control of Mom and Richard, and I had fallen right back into the same situation I had been trying to leave in the first place. I was in a situation where I again felt unloved and unwanted, and I was torturing myself over it. In my mind, I was turning into my mother in the process. I couldn’t allow myself to become her.
Maybe this is what happened. Maybe this is why she hated me. Maybe I was a daily reminder of someone she loved who didn’t love her back.
For the first time in my life, I felt pity for Mom and regret for not doing something to get our family the help it needed.
It was my fault; it was out of her control. I was responsible for all of it and I destroyed my family.
Suddenly I felt trapped again, like the day Mom cornered me in the bedroom with the broomstick and the Kleenex. “I have to get out of here,” I said out loud. I shut off the water and ran out of the bathroom.

My mind was racing; I had no money, no car, no family to call to help me, and I was stuck in the middle of nowhere.
Think, Sarah, think!
I was nearly eighteen years old, had a scholarship transferable to any approved business college, and a high school diploma; I could go anywhere and do anything I wanted. I walked into Matt’s living room and suddenly remembered a party we had there a few weeks back. One of the people at the party had been an old friend from school named Justin. I call him a friend because he was one of the few people in school who never made fun of me with the rest of the kids and never got up and left the lunch table because I sat down at it. We had a lot of the same interests and had spent many lunch hours talking about horseback riding or basketball; sometimes those conversations were the highlight of my day after a night of terror with Mom.

Justin had announced at the party that evening that he had decided to join the military and then proceeded to spend the rest of the night complaining that he had to go two hours south to another recruiting office because the one up here screwed up his paperwork. Justin and I had talked later that evening and he told me about all of the places he could travel and the different people he could meet. It had sounded so exciting at the time, but twice as good to me now.
The military, Sarah, are you serious? From one dictatorship to another?
But it was like a light bulb had gone off in my head and the clouds lifted from my mind. Of course I didn’t want to really join the military, but it was a way out and a way to get as far away from Mom, Matt, Richard, that town, and the house as I possibly could at that moment in my life.

Without thinking, I picked up the phone book, found Justin’s phone number, and dialed it. As I heard the phone ring, I started to feel very silly, but before I could change my mind, Justin answered.

“Yaaa…lo” Justin said.

“Justin? This is Sarah Burleton; remember from school and the party a couple weeks ago?”

“Yeah! Yeah! What’s up?” he asked.

“Re…re…remember when you…you… said that you were driving down t…t…o a recruiting office to join the military?” I couldn’t get the words out. I had suddenly become extremely nervous and scared and I had to sit down in the armchair next to the phone cradle before I collapsed.

“Oh yeah! I leave tomorrow afternoon; you guys having another party or something?”

God give me the strength to do this.

I took a deep breath. “No, I want to go with you.” The other end of the phone went silent and I waited nervously for Justin to either hang up or answer me.

“Things not working out, huh?” he finally answered in a soft voice. Tears welled up in my eyes. “No, Justin, they aren’t. I need to leave and get away from here. I can’t take it anymore.” My tears started rolling out of my eyes, down my cheeks, and into the phone receiver; I tried to wipe them away but the more I wiped, the more the tears gushed out of my eyes.

“Can you be ready by tomorrow at eleven?” Justin asked.

My tears immediately stopped and I sat up straight in the armchair. “Are you serious?” I asked. “You would take me down there with you? What do I take, what do I do?”

“Just pack up your clothes that you want to leave with and I’ll fill you in and give you some brochures on the way down.” Justin stopped and I could hear him swallow.